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What’s the topic of next public meeting? They’ll tell you later

“Killing the messenger” has for years been a favorite method of some local public officials to address problems.

Finding themselves under fire for their positions or their mistakes, they squander public meeting time lashing out at the news media. We at the Herald take such blather in stride, because it reminds us of yet another metaphor — “The guilty dog barks loudest.”

What we cannot abide is when government officials try to kill the message. This happens all too frequently, and some of the most common examples relate to public meetings.

Prior to any meeting of a local government body, officials are required by law to provide “adequate public notice” of that meeting. While the state’s courts have declined to set specific guidelines for this standard, they have held that it means “such notice based on the totality of circumstances as would fairly inform the public.”

Maury County officials apparently believe that publishing an agenda a few hours before a county commission meeting constitutes adequate notice, as this is their regular practice. We disagree.

This timing does not give citizens a fair chance to learn what will be discussed at the meeting or how it affects them. It does not give them time to contact their representatives about the matter before deliberations are held or votes are cast.

It certainly reduces the likelihood that citizens will attend local government meetings — a hallmark of an engaged democracy and something most elected officials claim to desire.

Even some commissioners have complained that they do not have adequate time to prepare for meetings because of the agenda’s last-minute distribution. If these elected officials feel uninformed, is there any way their constituents have been fairly informed?

Then there is the Maury County School System, which routinely refuses to make public the information it provides in packets to school board members prior to their meetings. Without this supporting information, the board’s jargon-filled meeting agendas are often inscrutable to the average person.

The state comptroller’s Office of Open Records Counsel in August of 2010 rendered an opinion that records of this type become public as soon as they are “made” by staff. The documents need not be finalized or approved before being made available to citizens.

Nonetheless, school system administrators persist in blocking timely access. On Wednesday we were told a packet that had already been released to school board members for Thursday’s meeting could not be released to the public because the director of schools had not yet approved it.

We can only think of a few possible reasons why our officials would do such a lousy job of informing the public about their meetings. The most obvious is that they don’t really want citizens to know what they’re working on. After all, it’s much easier to get things done when no one’s looking over your shoulder, right? Perhaps they are simply disorganized or just don’t consider informing the public to be a priority.

Whatever the reasons, the result is a loss of public trust. Citizens who feel excluded from the process of government are likely to be suspicious of their leaders’ motives. They are likely to be angry when asked to support those leaders’ decisions through taxes or other sacrifices.

Our elected leaders should see to it that the public is informed about the particulars of their meetings well in advance.

If they would, the next time they take the trouble to “kill the messenger” at a public meeting, there might be someone in the audience to care.